Fashion

Calvin to the Core

When Calvin Klein sold his business, five years ago, he stepped off a four-decade juggernaut that harnessed obsessive perfectionism to a gut understanding of what the American body wanted. His vision moved fluidly from the sensuality of the Studio 54 years to the serene classicism that followed his marriage to Kelly Rector, to an edgy 90s aesthetic with Kate Moss as muse. As Klein talks candidly about the trauma of letting go, Ingrid Sischy connects the fashion icon’s life to his designs.

Klein at his Miami Beach home. “I’ve experienced sex with men, with women. I’ve fallen in love with women.… I have experienced lots of things that have influenced my world.” Photographs by Bruce Weber.

Five years ago, when Calvin Klein was in the process of selling the fashion-and-design company that bears his name, family and friends were worried. “I thought, Oh my Lord! Is he going to be depressed?” says Bianca Jagger. “Will he regret that he sold his business? How will he react? I’ve had a few friends who have sold their businesses and it’s almost as if their life is over, despite the money they have acquired. How wrong I was.” Klein’s daughter, Marci, a TV producer, couldn’t imagine her father without his label. “I was like, What?” she remembers. “What are you talking about? Like, you’re a workaholic. Like, you can’t not work. I thought about when Johnny Carson left. I remember thinking, What’s he going to do? What are we going to watch?”

There was also reason for concern on a more personal level. Those who were closest to Klein had for some time been anticipating a D-day on the substance-abuse front. It had become obvious to his intimates that Klein was once again battling demons that he had first wrestled down in the late 80s. There were “morning after” phone calls among insiders reporting of antics, kept just among friends out of protection and love for him. Miraculously, his work hadn’t suffered—which says a lot about Klein’s extraordinary sense of responsibility to his company—and, for the most part, neither had his public image.

But then, on March 24, 2003, less than six weeks after Klein and his longtime friend and business partner, Barry Schwartz, sold their company to Phillips–Van Heusen, picking up $400 million in cash for themselves (plus approximately $30 million in PVH stock, along with future royalties), the designer set jaws dropping, tongues wagging, and headlines screaming across New York. The setting was Madison Square Garden, a game between the Knicks and the Toronto Raptors. Most people sitting courtside don’t get up and breeze over to say hi to one of the players, as Klein did with the Knicks’ Latrell Sprewell while the player was trying to inbound the ball at midcourt. According to tabloid accounts, a “stumbling … off-balance” Klein grabbed Sprewell’s arm and started to chat him up, until a friend and two security men escorted Klein back to his seat. “I didn’t know that was him,” Sprewell said after the game. “I wasn’t nervous, but I was surprised. I was like, Is security going to come over here at some point or what?” Adding to the embarrassing public nature of it all, the New York City Council soon passed a “Calvin Klein” bill, which increased the fines for unruly fans who interfere with games; one of the most powerful names in fashion was now associated with streakers and bottle throwers.

For all his celebrity and off-and-on notoriety, Klein the man is extremely shy, so private, such a paragon of discretion, and so old-fashioned and correct in the department of manners that this episode must have been agonizing for him. I’ve known him well for about 6 years, and casually for 12 years before that, and I can just picture him playing the scene over and over in his head the next day, torturing himself. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before he was out of the public eye and far from the madding crowd, just another human being who fucked up, the way we all do, trying to put himself back together in the safety of rehab at the Meadows, a clinic in Arizona.

When he talks about that time today, he sounds like someone at peace with the idea that he can’t always be perfect. This recognition had to have been hard for a man who is so obsessed with perfection—in the clothes he designed, in bodies, in colors, in photographs, in houses, in the suits he now wears (made by Caraceni, once Gianni Agnelli’s tailor)—that he has spent much of his life in pursuit of it; the rigor of that pursuit is one of the things that define him as a designer.

I found Klein’s acknowledgement of his substance-abuse relapse all the more moving because confessional speeches go against his grain. “I crashed after I actually did the deal,” he says. “I think I was overwhelmed with what was going to be next—the future. For a number of years, I was preparing for this. I knew that I was looking for other challenges or maybe other things. I had made so many collections. I had done everything I wanted to do. I was ready to let go. But when it actually happened I just went completely crazy. Then, once again, I dealt with getting my life together. Since then, it’s been the best time in my life.”

We began our conversations for this piece in the summer of 2006. Our first taped session took place in Southampton at his large, turreted Gothic mansion, which sits on one of the best sites on Long Island, facing both the ocean and Shinnecock Bay. The designer had recently finished temporary renovations, removing every arch, squaring off planes, getting rid of all the pink and black and gold—wiping out all traces of the monstrous renovation executed by a previous owner—and coating the whole place in a Calvin-approved shade of white (it’s never simply white), so he could bear to live in it while he figured out what to do with the joint. For the next six months or so we continued our talks in New York City, meeting when the mood struck, or where the story took us. We spent informal time together, too, which included dinners at Klein’s two other new homes, in New York and Miami. He was always the first one to get to our appointments, always in good humor, and dressed like Calvin Klein—impeccably, but never in a show-offy way.

It hasn’t really been possible until now, five years after his last collection, to fully measure what Klein accomplished as a designer and a businessman—jobs that were for him completely intertwined. While some designers look down their noses at bottom-line concerns, or at least pretend to, Klein, because he had this double perspective, was able to nail the Zeitgeist with precision time and time again; often, in fact, he nudged the Zeitgeist forward. In that way, he has been a great and canny pop artist, like Andy Warhol or Madonna. Klein says he was never “snobby” about his role as a designer, never wanted to limit his audience to the elite. “Some people are motivated by money, some by power. I think what motivated Calvin was to do something that had never been done before,” says his friend Sandy Gallin, the former talent manager.

Another thing that set Klein apart in the fashion world was the utter seriousness with which he took his job—sometimes at the expense of the business’s social niceties. After a show, for instance, there is always the protocol of going backstage to schmooze the designers. It’s almost a tribal rite practiced by most of the big shots in the business. And it was clearly something that Klein despised. Once, after a men’s-wear show in Milan in 2000, he just turned his back on me and marched off. I brought this up with him during our talks, and he laughed. He said that he hated the idea that people at shows would feel pressured to give him a lot of phony baloney. He also explained how deep his investment in the work was. “You want to talk about how crazy I am?” he asked. “You could go and do an article on that. I’m not a normal person. I know it. In one sense we were appealing to Wall Street, trying to be a real business, where you’d say, ‘It’s a business that’s not emotional—it’s all marketing, it’s all figured out. You don’t have to worry.’ But let me tell you, it’s very emotional, it’s very personal. And I cared a great deal. By the time [a show] was over I just wanted to go home and be by myself.”

This is a reason that Klein’s name has transcended the field of fashion: for all its commercial savvy, his work has, indeed, been highly personal, a product not just of its times but more specifically of the way the times influenced the designer. Klein himself has been a human weather vane. What went on in the mid- to late 70s—when he became an international celebrity hanging out at Studio 54, a designer who reinforced America’s arrival as a fashion force and set the retail world on fire with Calvin Klein jeans (and his controversial commercials featuring a sexed-up teenage Brooke Shields)—is the most extreme example of this interplay, but it has really been true of his entire career. By the time he was done with his company, more than three decades after he founded it, people’s ideas about fashion had radically changed.

His life began humbly. Klein, who was born on November 19, 1942, grew up in a Jewish immigrant family in the northern part of the Bronx, near Riverdale. He rarely mentions his older brother or younger sister, but they all lived in very close quarters in the apartment where he spent his entire youth. Right from the get-go, Klein saw what it meant to work hard. His father, Leo—who’d arrived in the States from Budapest at age five—was often absent, because of the long hours he put in at the family grocery store, on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Calvin, a mini merchant-in-training, would visit the store and remembers lots of conversations about the cost of things, a subject which interested him even then. “I would see grapefruits in the fruit-and-vegetable department, and some of them were 29 cents a pound and others were 49 cents,” he recalls. “I’d ask, ‘What’s the difference between the two?’ My father said, ‘Some people like to pay 29 cents and some like to pay 49 cents.’ I thought, Hmmm. I learned later that that’s the fashion business to a great deal. You pick the spot where you want to be, where you want your products to be. Many people think just because it’s more expensive it’s better. That isn’t always the truth.”

Klein doesn’t talk about a happy childhood. Instead he describes it as secure and serious. But he does light up when he describes the countless afternoons that he and his mother, Flore, known as Flo, whiled away on Bainbridge Avenue, hanging around the dress-and-alteration shop that his grandmother Molly owned. It was a tiny, jam-packed place. Still, for Klein it was like a Wunderkammer. His grandmother had once worked for Hattie Carnegie, the pioneering American sportswear designer, and Flo, who liked to sketch fashion, couldn’t get enough of talking about it or, apparently, of buying it. (“Every time I get crazy about clothes I think about my mother spending all of my father’s money during the war,” Klein has said.) Hanging around with these two—what better training could the young boy have had about what women want and don’t want out of clothes? Years later he said: “I spent the first ten years of my life designing beige, cream, white, brown, because those were all the colors that [my mother] loved. She would line her jackets in fur, she would do all of these outrageous things considering that we came from what you would call a very middle class family in the Bronx.” The talk at Molly’s wasn’t only about fashion. Klein remembers that his mother would often tell him how ashamed she’d been as a child that Molly was divorced, so humiliated that she’d pretended her father was dead. One wonders if this is the root of the concern for appearances that Klein has; it’s a surprising anxiety when one thinks about how much épater-ing he has done of bourgeois tastes and beliefs.

Klein early on expressed his own interest in fashion, sketching his designs and throwing himself into special art classes at P.S. 80. When he learned that a friend’s mother had been a designer, he was over the moon. “I don’t think I was more than 10 or 11, but I glommed on to her, showing her my sketches and ideas, and talking to her about them all the time,” he says with a laugh. His intimates always talk about Klein’s drive and ambition. As Barry Diller, his friend of some 30 years, says, “In any place, in any business—in anything—Calvin would succeed. With him it’s a force of curiosity and willfulness.” At the beginning, there was also impatience. Klein says, “I couldn’t wait to get to high school so that I could get out of the Bronx. As soon as I got to school, I couldn’t wait to get to work. I was always in a rush, and I was always thinking about the next step and the future.” This was not a kid who played hooky. “I was always in art class,” he remembers. “But I knew at an early age that I wasn’t going to be a painter in a studio working with a canvas. I was interested in design, in clothes.” His fashion-and-design education—New York’s High School of Industrial Arts, in Manhattan; extra classes at the Art Students League; college at the Fashion Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1963; a string of garmento jobs—was solid, but basic. From high school through college the routine was pretty dull: wake up, go into Manhattan on the train for classes, take the train back home to the Bronx at night, get the homework done, go to bed, and start all over again the next morning. But his ability to give it his all was in the blood. “I came from a family in which all they did was talk about work,” he says.

Socially, Klein didn’t run with a big gang in school. As has been true throughout his life, there were only a few intimates. “I’ve always had that since I was a child,” he explains. “Because my sister and brother are so far apart in years, we were just never close as a family. I felt somewhat alone.” (He once told Warhol and Bianca Jagger in an interview that his brother used to refer to him as “the king,” which says everything about his position in the family.) To fill the void there were the long days of studies, the hopes for the future, and a few close friends, principally Jayne Centre, who lived nearby and had gone with him to P.S. 80, as well as F.I.T., and Barry Schwartz, Klein’s best friend since age five.

Klein started seeing Centre, a New York knockout, in junior high; they were two green-eyed kids from the Bronx, both dreaming of a much grander existence. The early years of their courtship involved the usual dating rituals, a movie and a bite. Centre was smart and artsy (she became a textile designer), and they both wanted some kind of artistic life. They were married in 1964 (she was 20, he was 21), at the Hampshire House hotel, on Central Park South. Their lives had officially begun. Picture Barefoot in the Park, but with a divorce on the horizon.

It was Calvin’s relationship with Schwartz that had the glue. They would stick together, through thick and thin, for 56 years (Schwartz is six months Klein’s senior). This was one of those celebrated, nothing-can-tear-them-asunder partnerships in the fashion world, like that between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, or Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti. To look at the relationship in the simplest terms, what Schwartz did was provide the business structure to help make Klein’s vision real. (People say he could do numbers in his head quicker than a calculator, and in the company’s early years, especially, he had a reputation as a super-tough bargainer.) “It was the ideal partnership because we didn’t compete,” says Schwartz. Since the sale there’s been a drift in the relationship. That makes its own kind of sense, for the two men were really opposites, their differences growing more pronounced as the years went on. A list could fill up this page, but let’s start with the obvious. Klein has had two marriages and seen a lot of other action, while Schwartz, to quote the designer from a 1984 Playboy interview, “lives a very straight, normal, family kind of life. He hates being in New York and wants to go home to his children, wants to be on the farm, looking at his horses. We have to understand and be tolerant of each other.” At the start, though, when they were becoming friends at five, who knew from such things? They began their first business venture around then, selling cups of water, which they got for free, from Molly’s shop, on a nearby street corner. By age nine they had a newspaper business, selling the Daily News and the Mirror at a markup. Klein once remarked that dividing up the money they’d made was like sex to Schwartz; he also remembered that Schwartz would always push the extra penny over to Klein’s side.

“I always believed in him,” Schwartz says, “but it was pretty easy to believe in him, because he’s a pretty impressive guy.” Whereas Klein’s mission was to become a designer, for Schwartz—whose father was also in the small-supermarket business in Harlem—it was business, business, business. He got his chance to flex his muscles at it faster than anyone had imagined. In 1964, Schwartz, then 22, was away in the army but rushed home after his father was murdered on the job; as the only son, he had to step in. This sudden responsibility eventually led to a kind of crossing-the-Rubicon moment for Calvin as well. A few years later, he remembers, “I was at a terrible job making inexpensive Dacron dresses, and Barry said, ‘Why don’t we go into the grocery business together? We’ll open lots of stores. We’ll have a chain and make lots of money.’ ” Klein was torn. After all his striving, the supermarket business? But he was married now, had responsibilities—Marci, his daughter, was born in 1966—and certainly wasn’t thrilled or inspired by the depressing work he was doing. To him it was drudgery, not design. As he considered Schwartz’s offer, he went to his folks for advice—one of the few times he’d ever done that. He expected a difference of opinion, that his practical father would tell him to go with Schwartz for the financial security that this plan offered, while his mother would want him to continue with the fashion thing. What Klein heard shocked him. His mother was silent; she really didn’t have to say anything, because his father advised his son to stay the course, and see his fashion vision through. Otherwise, Leo Klein said, he’d be sorry. Calvin recalls the conversation as the best advice anyone has ever given him. “What he was really telling me is it’s not about money,” remembers Klein. “It’s about being happy and feeling good about what you’re doing. I just sailed out of there.”

Schwartz’s response to Klein’s “I just can’t do it” was to siphon cash out of the register at the family’s supermarket and hand it over to his best friend so he could begin to be a fashion designer for real. The sum was $10,000. (He later added another $25,000.) When Schwartz had given his buddy the money, he meant it as a show of faith and support and did not expect anything but a thanks. Klein would have none of it, and insisted they were now partners. Klein used the money to create a handful of ensembles that could serve as a selling platform. The focus was on coats—with dresses or skirts and blouses underneath. (This would lead to Klein’s being slotted as a coat designer for the first five years of his career.) He held on to his day job too, as a kind of safety net, continuing to work on clothes that left him cold. But now he had an outlet for his own stuff, which he put together at night and on weekends. He’d sketch out his designs and then pass them on to others he’d befriended on jobs: a pattern-maker he’d found on Long Island, and then a special sample tailor from Coney Island. There was a lot of running around, but Klein wasn’t about to let up. Then the boss found out about his double life. “It became a really unpleasant scene,” remembers the designer. “I felt terrible. I had a contract with them, and I was close to one of the owners, and I betrayed them. They asked me to leave immediately, and I did.” In March 1968, he leased Room 613, a cubbyhole of a space at the York Hotel, on Seventh Avenue, where other manufacturers had modest showrooms, too. (“That number stayed with us for a lot of years,” says Schwartz. “It’s always been our lucky number. The first plane that we bought, the Gulfstream, was 613CK.”)

Klein with daughter Marci, her husband, Scott Murphy, and their children, Nicholas and Theo.

The alliance between Klein and Schwartz was cemented on April 4, 1968, a date imprinted on our national consciousness. When word spread that evening that Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Klein and Schwartz were at a hockey game at Madison Square Garden. Klein remembers his friend predicting that there would be a riot in Harlem that night, and there wouldn’t be much of the family store left in the morning. He was right. The next day, after Schwartz made his way uptown and surveyed the damage, he phoned Klein and told him to get there pronto. Schwartz then made a remarkable proposal. Klein remembers, “He asked, Why don’t we just run up and down the aisles, knock everything down that’s still on the shelves, and then go outside and throw the key into the street and never come back?” One can only imagine the combination of pain, fear, and liberation that the two young men felt as they acted out these primal motions of letting go. I don’t know what the Schwartz family made of all this, but Klein now had company at the York Hotel: Schwartz, a newly free man with time on his hands to start planting the seeds for a business that would grow into an American legend.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that the house that became Calvin Klein, Inc., was born out of this brew of changing times, changing lives, and cultural revolutions. Change seems to be in the company’s DNA. Right from the start Klein wanted to clear away the cobwebs. “In design school, believe it or not, we were taught how to make above-the-table dresses,” he recalls. “It means when you’re seated at a table there has to be something happening from the waist up. I would think, Who on earth thinks like this? It has to be such an antiquated way of creating clothes for a modern woman.” The young designer had a much more contemporary view of women—as more than simply creatures of reproduction and decoration—which was evident from the rack of samples, his first collection, which he was getting ready to present at the York Hotel. He so nailed the way that women in the late 60s wanted to dress that when Donald O’Brien, Bonwit Teller’s general merchandise manager, got off the elevator on the wrong floor and accidentally landed in Klein’s showroom something instantly attracted him. What he saw included midcalf-length coats in a variety of pale colors and simple high-waisted sleeveless shift dresses. The fabrics had a lot of body, and the clothes had been steamed and molded within an inch of their lives. Today, Klein refers to them as “bulletproof” and “architectural,” and says they all could have stood up by themselves. “I thought American women needed to be more streamlined,” he says. “They moved faster, they were working, they were raising kids. It was that time when rules were changing. They were busy—they didn’t have time to change. They went to work, to the theater, to a restaurant. That was my inspiration. What I didn’t know at the time is that there were people all over the world who were thinking the same way.”

Clearly, O’Brien was on that wavelength. He dispatched a buyer from Bonwit’s to second what he felt he’d discovered, and then arranged a face-to-face for Klein with Mildred Custin, the store’s president. The next part of the story is firmly entrenched in fashion lore. Instead of taking his goods in a taxi, which might have led to the clothes’ becoming creased, he put everything on a rack and wheeled it himself, from Seventh Avenue and 37th Street to Fifth Avenue and 56th Street—a distance of nearly a mile and a half. “This way everything could be perfect,” he remembers. (“Perfect” is a word that comes up a lot with him.) A wheel broke on the way, but determination won out. Klein left Bonwit’s that day with a $50,000 order. Better yet, he outfoxed Custin, who ruled high-end retail back then—only Geraldine Stutz at Henri Bendel counted as competition—on the question of whether the store would have his line exclusively. It wasn’t easy to win on this point, because Custin may have spoken in a little-girl voice but she meant business. Klein didn’t cave, and kept the right to sell to others. The key to his fearlessness? “I saw my father not being assertive enough in business,” he says, “and that disturbed me. I watched him give up at a certain point when he was in his middle 50s. It just killed me. I thought, Why doesn’t he fight?”

Now came the tough part: the challenge of actually producing the outfits in a way that would keep their quality and still get them delivered to the stores on time. Klein remembers, “Every aspect of this was an adventure—from the banks to the fabric houses, to trucking.” After turning cartwheels to get it all done, day after day, long night after long night, Schwartz and Klein came through—with help from their mothers, who sewed the Calvin Klein labels into the coats and dresses. Not only did the clothes make it to Bonwit’s on time, they sold. The buzz about Klein began.

This success of these first few years was due to many factors, not just the way Klein’s designs hit a nerve. The partners did their own P.R., cold-calling buyers, other fashion people, and that era’s retail bible, the Tobe Report. As Klein says, “The great thing with fashion is that word travels fast.” Besides, Schwartz knew exactly how to play it, and Klein himself was a lure. He is down to earth, direct, and has an easy sense of intimacy. He also has a seductive boyishness that has nothing to do with age, not to mention good looks, cool, and a magnetism that attracts both sexes. (When I was interviewing people about him for this piece, I was struck by how many men and women confessed that they once had a crush on him.) None of this hurts when you’re trying to make your way in the world, especially if you also have promise, which Klein did, winning him the support of an established designer, Chester Weinberg, and the editors who ruled the fashion press. At Vogue, Klein could count on Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a man whose family had supported Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes and who was then at the height of his fabulousness. He moved in the same circles as Cole Porter and Noël Coward, was full of stories about Coco Chanel, and worked under Diana Vreeland, the most inspired nutter in all of fashion-magazine history. The September 1975 Vogue trumpeted, “If you were around a hundred years from now and wanted a definitive picture of the American look in 1975, you’d study Calvin Klein.”

It is de Gunzburg in particular whom Klein credits with helping him when he was first developing his fashion voice, in the early 70s. Klein says, “I just worshipped him. I was so thrilled that he would look at what I was doing and tell me honestly what he thought, whether it was good, not good, whether I could do better.” Later, Klein would end up hiring de Gunzburg when Condé Nast put him out to pasture, around 1975. But in the early days, when he was on top, their conversations stimulated Klein’s vision of what he was creating and helped the young designer formulate the big themes that would carry through the decades that followed. “He saw that I was doing something that he felt was relevant and American,” remembers Klein. “He kept referring to that all the time. He’d say, ‘It’s American, it’s pure, it’s not fake, artificial, decorative.’ Not any of the stuff that he disliked.”

Klein’s timing couldn’t have been better. Even though Europe still regarded the States as a fashion backwater, the American industry was coming alive. Anne Klein (no relation) was in her heyday, and thanks to her and others (including Yves Saint Laurent, across the ocean) the enormous possibilities of what was called “luxury sportswear” were becoming evident. Calvin didn’t miss his chance: in 1973, he changed the direction of the company from coats to sportswear. “It was Calvin’s call,” says Schwartz. “He was the visionary. I just executed what he wanted done.”

The other predominant strain in American fashion was a new kind of democratized glamour, most evident in the work of Roy Halston Frowick. Halston had begun as a hatmaker, turning out Jackie Kennedy’s famous pillbox (ironic, when one considers his nonmedicinal use of cocaine), but he was a font of talent, with a wide range. His tailored suits, crêpe evening dresses, and signature Ultrasuedes were coveted by fashion hounds of all stripes, from Texas oil wives to the era’s boldfaced names. Klein, 10 years his junior, wasn’t yet in the same league. But the look of Klein’s clothes—the focus on simplicity, subtlety, and a clean cut—and the philosophy behind them were similarly rooted in a casual American style that went back to the 40s and pioneering designers such as Claire McCardell. Merchants and editors tuned in to what Klein was doing before fellow designers, some of whom were downright condescending. For Klein’s part, his early years in business were so consuming that he didn’t have time to worry about what people were saying behind his back.

He also didn’t have much time for Jayne and Marci, which did not help his marriage. The family had moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and there was many a night without Calvin. The days were long—18 hours was not unusual—and Klein often slept at the West 37th Street showroom, along with Schwartz (the floor and a convertible couch came in handy). Klein’s regret about the life he missed with Marci is visceral. He and Marci are fiercely close these days. Her childhood memories humanize the sense of finished product that is Klein’s public image. “They were young parents from the Bronx,” she says. “They were still living in Queens when I was born, so I remember my dad before he was famous. There were canvases around and he was [still] painting. ‘Hippies’ is not the right word for them, but they were artsy. The apartment didn’t look like other people’s. It had white wood floors and all white walls. They weren’t like anybody else’s [parents].” Calvin and Jayne would stick it out for Marci’s first six years, divorcing in 1974. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to be the work that busted up the family. Klein once analyzed it thus: “We were kids. We grew in different directions.”

He began making a name for himself as a man-about-town, with a list of consorts that eventually included both women and men, but he was continuing to give work his all. An old friend, Lizzette Kattan de Pozzi, now the Honduran consul in Milan, shared a “love shack” pad with Klein on the Upper East Side for a few years after he split from Jayne. She remembers that period vividly: “He would just collapse on the couch at the showroom and fall asleep and wake up the next day, and he would still be trying to get the perfect cut or the perfect sleeve until he had it. The man drives on perseverance until he gets it, looking for that right touch. I spent endless nights with him doing that, whether he was drawing or we spent, I think, maybe two nights trying to get the right cut on a bathing suit once. He doesn’t give up.”

This perseverance paid off. In just 10 years the partners had created a $100 million business. Klein, 36 in 1978, had already won the Coty Award, a prestigious honor in fashion circles, three times. Meanwhile, his apartment, on the 46th floor of the Sovereign building, between Sutton Place and First Avenue and designed by Joe D’Urso, was emblematic of his new life. The look was a composite of white walls, gray industrial carpet, and black leather, which was the dominant motif; among its features were a platform bed covered in black leather and a black leather hammock in the living room.

Klein’s creative team from this period is famous in fashion circles. That is one of his great talents: he has an instinct about whom to bring on and when. He’ll go the extra mile to get them, too. In the 90s, when he was looking for a new company president to revitalize the label’s image and make it more global, he set his sights on Gabriella Forte, who had worked beside Giorgio Armani for ages. When he couldn’t reach her directly, he waited outside her house in Milan so he could make her an offer. Guess where she ended up working? Back in 1976, he brought on Frances Stein, an editor at Vogue (she had also been in Halston’s inner circle), to be part of his creative team. Over time Klein would hire a cluster’s worth of star talent, including Grace Coddington from British Vogue, in the 80s, and stylists Tonne Goodman and Melanie Ward, who went on to become editors at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, respectively. One often hears from fashion old-timers that the Stein era represents a high point in Klein’s career. As many others have pointed out, that period, which went from 1976 to 1979, was when the designer really found his voice and started to articulate the vocabulary that we now think of as his: sexuality, sensuality, and classicism, with the key words being “attitude” and “gesture.” Stein wasn’t with Klein for long—she would go on to serve Chanel as an accessories designer for more than two decades—and the fight between her and the designer on her last day is said to have been a humdinger, but those who were around the label then always remark on the way that Stein keyed in to Klein’s personal style, and to what was going on in his private life, and used those insights to help clarify his voice as a designer.

Like others, John Calcagno, who worked for Klein during that period in the design studio, credits Stein with helping to put the undercurrent of heat into the label. “I don’t think it became really sexy and sensual until Frances arrived,” he says. But he also flips the whole thing back to Klein himself: “I remember what Calvin wore in those years. It was these heavy tweed suits, not unlike what the Duke of Windsor would wear, or what Ralph [Lauren] would wear or do. But because of Calvin’s body and the length and slouchiness of it”—Klein is a skinny six feet one—“the whole thing changed. Of course, what he did was wear it with a T-shirt, which also made all the difference, which is exactly what Frances must have seen. I’ve never forgotten this: the way he wore his thick socks, because I think he felt he had skinny ankles, with these heavy shoes, and the perfection of the way the jeans sat on his body, the way he looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted them, the oh-so-perfect T-shirts that he bought by the hundreds. The way the clothes draped on his body, there was a kind of sensuality which I think Frances picked up on and somehow translated into the clothes we did at that period, which I think really was a change.”

Klein didn’t always have that much on. There’s a hilarious story that Calcagno tells about working with the designer on the first menswear collection, which launched in 1978. Calcagno had gone off to Scotland to pick out tweeds with Zack Carr, the very talented head designer who would work beside Klein off and on for more than 27 years (and Calcagno’s partner at the time). The two men needed to consult with Klein regarding the final choices. It was summertime and the designer was out at the house in Fire Island that he shared with fellow designer Giorgio Sant’ Angelo, so Klein told the team to come on out and bring the Scottish textile man who was going to supply the tweeds. They took a seaplane to the Pines and found Klein and Sant’ Angelo sunning themselves on the beach in charmeuse bikinis. “There we were,” Calcagno remembers, “picking out tweeds with them all oiled up, with this conservative Scotsman, and it was just unforgettable.”

But it was in women’s fashion where the label really began to innovate. The designers discarded the stiffer fabrics and more structured designs with which Klein had made his name and started to use softer materials they thought were sensual, such as crêpe de Chine, thin cashmeres, charmeuse, satin, linens, and layers of silks (minus anything underneath). As Calcagno says, with these clothes, “everyone took notice.” Instead of making the shapes or structures of clothes the focal point, the designers found magic in the drama of what happened when they put together different textures. Klein recalls, “To me the contrast between rough fabrics and satin fabrics against a woman’s body was really sexy. That’s how I started doing slip dresses in the very beginning. They were under something that was more tailored and strong. It’s the combination that has always intrigued me. The contrast between soft and hard.” The designer had also begun using the natural palette that he would explore for the rest of his career. (“All my staff had training on color names from Calvin himself,” remembers Nian Fish, the creative director at the public-relations firm KCD, who worked with Klein beginning in 1990. “White was not white. It was chalk, or it was Dover, after the white cliffs of Dover. One would never say beige. It was sand. And black would be coal. It’s like how the Eskimos have all these different names for snow.”)

There was something else, too: a discipline that kept the clothes focused on a few strategies. By the late 70s the art world may have considered “minimalism” old hat; in fashion, however, the term would not be in common usage for another 10 years or so. But at the time Klein and his collaborators hit on some of minimalism’s fundamental principles and translated them into their own kind of fashion vocabulary.

It was in 1977 that Calvin Klein the man became Calvin Klein the icon; you can pinpoint it in the press coverage, in the paparazzi shots of him and Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli and Andy Warhol and everyone else who was hanging out at Studio 54, the era’s defining nightclub. Klein was made for the place, which opened in April 1977, and the club, where the creativity and license that were coursing through the 1970s flowered, seems to have been made for him. For a few years, the disco was the nerve center for New York’s fashion, art, and entertainment worlds. As Klein says, “Who wanted to be lunching with a socialite? I wanted to be part of a whole new era that got inspired by what was happening in the world. It was an amazing time in New York City. Everyone from all walks of life, from any part of the world—at least I had the opportunity to meet them and get inspired by the way people looked or by what they did. I was there. Studio 54 was our El Morocco, our Stork Club.”

For many of those who frequented the club, their time together seems to have either made them never want to see one another again or bonded them forever. Although Klein and Barry Diller had met some years before, at a lunch at Ali MacGraw’s house in Los Angeles, Studio 54 is where the two became true friends. As Diller remembers it, “There was a group of us who would go to Studio all the time. There was a ritual in our lives, which was we would go to Calvin’s. We would go at 11 or 12 at night and hang around. Some of them were doing drugs. I didn’t know from drugs. It was Steve [Rubell], Halston, Sandy [Gallin], David [Geffen] if he was around, and maybe a couple of others. Andy Warhol wasn’t part of this group. He was somewhere where people were paying for dinner. We would then go to Studio.”

With the music blasting, the topless waiters shimmying, and shenanigans in every banquette and bathroom, the club’s vibe was the opposite of a staid boardroom’s, but for Klein it also happened to be the place where one of the biggest business opportunities of his life presented itself. There he was one night in 1977, dancing up a storm just before daybreak. “I ran into this guy at Studio 54 at four o’clock in the morning who said to me, ‘How would you like to put your name on jeans?’ ” recalls Klein. The music was deafening, and no doubt Klein had more than Perrier in his system, but he got the potential impact of the offer. The entire concept of “designer jeans,” such a given today, was in embryo form back then. Fiorucci, a store near Bloomingdale’s that was more like a nightclub than a retail environment, offered a pop riff on the classic Levi’s, with examples in gold and plastic. Gloria Vanderbilt had launched her eponymous line of jeans in 1976, and Jordache would bring out its upscale jeans around the same time Klein’s hit stores two years later. But that night at Studio 54, this was still something of a lightbulb idea. The man said he was speaking for a friend in the fashion business, and asked, “How would you like to make a million dollars?” “I heard him loud and clear,” the designer remembers. “When it’s about the work and the business, I don’t miss it. I thought this could really be interesting. My mind was going. I always liked the idea that I would be able to reach more people. That’s why the jeans interested me. The jeans gave me the opportunity to get the message across to the masses. They gave me an opportunity to create in another way.”

Klein was leaving for Frankfurt later that morning, planning on sleeping on the plane. When he got to the airport he phoned Schwartz to give him the lowdown and the contact. The rest is history. It turned out that the company that was involved in the deal, Puritan Fashions, had made only dresses before, but they were ready to jump into the jeans market. This was really the first big deal Schwartz made for the label, and he negotiated it with real smarts and vision. He got royalties on every pair of jeans sold ($1 per), with a provision for a cost-of-living increase. It wasn’t long before Puritan was shipping 500,000 pairs of Calvin Klein jeans a week. (As Schwartz remembers it, the jeans cost $19.75 to make and sold for $40 a pair.) The ongoing business meant that Schwartz worked closely with Carl Rosen, whose family owned Puritan, and after five years Calvin Klein, Inc., ended up purchasing Puritan for $68 million; by then the company was selling about $500 million worth of jeans a year.

The playing with fabrics and their erotic possibilities that was so critical to the ready-to-wear fashion also cropped up in the marketing of the jeans—Klein’s first masterstroke of many as an advertiser. “The first thing we did were those Brooke Shields commercials,” he says, “and they caught on like crazy.” I’ll say. It’s difficult to think of another series of ads that kicked up as big a brouhaha as did Richard Avedon’s 1980 TV commercial featuring a 15-year-old Shields looking directly into the camera and asking, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Nearly 30 years later it’s not difficult to understand why this ad—in which Shields was dressed in a loose charmeuse shirt, which Klein describes as “the color of liquid,” and a pair of his jeans—created such a kerfuffle. This was an early iteration of the fashion world’s now perennial theme of the girl-woman, both innocent and sexual. (The fact that Shields had played a pre-pubescent prostitute in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby a couple of years earlier surely added fuel to the fire.) The other commercials in the series continued to pivot on double entendres—in one, Shields recites a monologue about genes; in another, she defines what it means to be “Calvinized.” All of that imagery became “indelible,” as Shields herself says. “There was an iconic tone to it,” the actress notes. “I don’t think you can really know that at the time, because it feels like that type of vision is after the fact. But [the response] was immediate. It was me and the jeans. We were inseparable. I didn’t do a television show without that being in my bio. I didn’t go on the street without somebody saying, ‘Got your Calvins on?’ People still come up to me and mention it.”

The images and the surrounding controversies got both actress and designer on the cover of People magazine in 1982; the designer took her for a celebration party at Studio 54. She remembers him being very protective of her.

He was less careful about himself in those years. While Klein walked away from the Studio era a much more famous, wealthy man, he also walked away with a taste for more than H2O. These days he is comfortable talking about how that period has a role in the etiology of his history with addiction. Klein remembers, “I was experimenting during that time. I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t know I was doing something that could really be damaging. We would tell each other, ‘In South America they always do cocaine’—silly things like that.” During another of our conversations Klein returned to the theme of his carefree youth. “I burned the candle at both ends. When you’re young you can do that to a certain degree. I learned that I could not do it. I learned the hard way, and I paid a price. It was all new. I just didn’t know any better.” He pauses, then offers a kind of explanation, both for himself and for his set. “The thing is we were successful. We managed to be very high-functioning people. So that was a source of denial.”

When he says he was high-functioning, he isn’t kidding. No matter the chemical alterations to his system, he remained fully in charge at the company. “The thing that really connected me to Calvin is I knew how much he loved his work,” says Bruce Weber, the photographer who has shot so many of the label’s most memorable ads. “He could be out all night and might not go home, but he was in that office, on time, ready to go. That made me want to have that same drive for his work.” Klein’s ability to motivate people created not just a pride in the company—in the fashion, the campaigns, the new product lines—but an atmosphere of seductive excitement surrounding the designer himself. “We were all in love with Calvin,” says Calcagno, “as were all the editors. He was the most seductive person. You wanted to please him. Men, women, everyone.”

Klein certainly made good use of his charms. “He was one of the first designers to be treated as a movie star,” says Weber. “We used to hear all these stories about him. He’d be dating one of the girls and then some guy he met. He was really open about himself. He didn’t hide things. And that’s likable.” Indeed, this sexual ambiguity shows up loud and clear in the erotically charged imagery that Klein and Weber created together—which is what made the pictures reverberate so much with the times. Klein says, “You can see a photograph that Bruce Weber did which said a lot about my life. It was in 1985 for the fragrance Obsession, and [the model] Josie Borain was in it. I was obsessed with her. She was such an interesting woman and not an obvious sexpot, androgynous in a certain way but so fine and classy. In the ads there are arms and hands and all of these body parts all over her. You didn’t know if they were men or women. You didn’t know how many of them there were. But it got your mind going. That was a period of time when sex was everywhere, as were drugs. Not for everyone, of course. I’ve experienced—and I’ve said it before—a lot of my fantasies. I’ve experienced sex with men, with women. I’ve fallen in love with women. I’ve married women. And I have a family. I have experienced lots of things that have influenced my world. I am for good or bad a real example of whatever I’ve put out there. [The imagery] really is a part of me. And it happened because I was either observing or living in a certain way, or desiring to. It’s not something where we tried to say, Well, let’s outdo the other people and see if we can be more outrageous. It was real.”

Klein’s way of discussing his personal life—and entwining it with his work life—is emblematic of him. He’s not someone who kisses and tells; he’ll talk about the gist but not the details. As he told Playboy in 1984, “I think it’s more fun if you have the reputation and people don’t know everything—a little mystery isn’t so bad.” I believe there’s more to this, and it has to do with an incident that reinforced Klein’s fundamentally discreet nature. Thirty years later he still describes the day in 1978 that Marci, then 11, was kidnapped as the worst day of his life. The actual event sounds like something out of a frightening movie: Marci tricked off a school bus by a former babysitter, who had set up the scam with two accomplices; Calvin dropping off the $100,000 ransom, then going to rescue his child from the apartment where she’d been held (and, before it was over, being mistaken for one of the kidnappers by a huge F.B.I. squad). Marci remembers: “All of a sudden I hear him screaming my name. I hear him banging, banging, banging on all these doors.” Klein was in the hallway of the building where Marci had been left, but the kidnappers had given him the wrong apartment number. “I ran out and I saw him and I jumped into his arms. I’ve never felt so safe in my life.” Marci says they didn’t talk about what happened for years, and when they finally discussed it her father welled up with tears. For his part, Klein remembers, “That was a nightmare that changed our lives a great deal.” It certainly made him hyperconscious of the pitfalls of being a public person and having one’s life on display. “Let’s face it,” says Marci. “This is a guy from the Bronx. This was not what he thought was going to happen in his life, which has something to do with the way he is.”

By 1981 a new arrival had been added to the team. Kelly Rector would become an integral part of Klein’s life as his partner, wife, and, now, intimate friend, but she started out as an assistant who’d been very aware of him as a nighttime glamour-puss as well as a happening designer. Rector, then 21, had received her training in the design studio of Ralph Lauren and had observed Klein out and about at various hot spots, including Studio 54. She had interviewed with Klein a few months previously but didn’t get the position. Then they’d run into each other at Studio 54 and he’d called her at seven the following morning with a start date: the next day.

Eventually their professional and personal lives would merge, and out of that came new creative and business ideas. Kelly, for instance, is the one who came up with the idea of appropriating the men’s underwear for women. She remembers saying, “There’s something sexy about wearing your boyfriend’s underwear.” There was a gold mine in this offhand thought: $70 million worth in 1984 sales alone. More significantly, Kelly became the ne plus ultra of the designer’s “muses,” the basis for what we think of as the Calvin Klein woman—the woman who will go out in a perfect-looking thin-cashmere T-shirt evening dress, not the one who’s all glittered up in a va-va-va-voom number. In hindsight it’s hard to believe that their relationship was ever doubted. But, boy, were there a lot of raised eyebrows when their hookup went public in the early 80s. I remember when they married, in Rome in 1986 (and went fabric-hunting the next day). I wasn’t personally acquainted with either of them; at the time I barely knew anything about the fashion world. But I sure heard the gossip that the union was some kind of marketing-driven “marriage of convenience.” Because of the open way that Calvin had displayed his attractions to and relationships with men, it was assumed he was strictly gay (his earlier marriage being seen as some kind of aberration). Maybe none of us is immune from a desire to define people narrowly, and in the area of sexuality it’s a virtual reflex. “That person’s straight.” “This person’s gay.” “This is normal.” “That isn’t.” But life doesn’t come in neat slots; it is full of surprises, if one is lucky. Kelly says, “When you fall in love with someone, all the rumors that you hear fall away. My whole life changed with Calvin.” Their romance happened on the job. She remembers, “He would walk into the room, and it was just like the lights went on. The movie started every single day. I was so much more special when he came into the room.”

“Everyone who knows me would ask what happened at that moment,” remarks John Calcagno. “It was some kind of magic. He fell in love with her and she madly with him. They didn’t care who was around. They showed it, kissing and holding each other and having fun and cuddling.”

Klein’s personal income in 1981 was said to be around $8.5 million; the following year independent retailers and Calvin Klein boutiques pushed $750 million worth of product out the door. By the mid-80s, Klein ruled American fashion, along with Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan. Each of “the big three” had a distinct voice, but each was also inherently American. For Klein, there were occasional misses, such as when the women’s ready-to-wear line got uncomfortably close to what Yves Saint Laurent was doing. But Klein’s clarity and directness, his emphasis on trick-free fashion and natural fibers—he once said, “That damn polyester killed the whole country”—won him a devoted following. The house had a reputation in particular for turning out some of the best pants in the business, and its trench coats became a must-have item.

Not enough credit has been given to how on point Klein’s fashion was in the 80s, because the subject of his brilliant marketing seems to have eclipsed all else. He has struck gold often in his advertising campaigns, and with a lineup of photographers that would make any museum—that knew what it was doing—envious. Call it commerce or call it art, it doesn’t matter: the list, with only a few exceptions, reads like a Who’s Who of 20th-century fashion photography: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Mario Sorrenti, Juergen Teller, and more.

It used to be that if one was a “real” photographer one wouldn’t sully one’s “integrity” or “art” shooting fashion campaigns. Klein is one of a handful of designers who helped change that. He gave photographers such a visible forum for their work—shot in the spirit of his universe, of course—that it became prestigious to shill for him. There were Avedon’s taboo-busters with Shields, and unforgettable images by Penn of models draped in opulent mixes of fabrics that made them look like members of some kind of new, ultra-stylish tribe. But the photographer who captured (and helped define) the combination of polymorphous sexuality and physical wholesomeness that was such a big part of Klein’s imagery was Weber. (His ability to serve successfully as the photographic messenger for both Klein and Ralph Lauren—two fundamentally different designers—throughout the 80s is a subject worthy of its own article.) Weber’s big break came when he got the call from Klein’s people to come up to the office to discuss a jeans campaign. On his first assignment in 1981, with a model named Romeo—who’d been discovered by Calvin pushing a clothing cart on the street, just as the designer himself had once done—he created an instant pin-up. The money shot, the one that was chosen for a billboard in Times Square, as well as for magazine ads, presents a figure who is part Adonis, part toughie. With the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up, biceps rippling, one arm raised, cradling his head the way a Roman or Greek marble sculpture of a god might be posed, and the other arm grazing his abdomen, fingers just under the waistband, Romeo looks like the progeny of a marriage between James Dean and Elvis Presley, before the fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. (According to others who were around at the time, Romeo’s charms were not lost on Klein.) I asked Weber if he’d realized he had a hit with the picture. With a laugh, he said, “There was so much yelling. Frances was screaming at Romeo because he kept eating pizza and was wiping his hands on his pressed white T-shirt.”

One of the subsequent Weber shoots, a 10-day affair in 1982 on the Greek island of Santorini that would produce images for an array of Klein products, was one of the wildest in advertising history, which is saying something. Twenty-six years later the people who were there still talk about it. The group included the label’s creative director, Rochelle Udell; her assistant Sam Shahid (who would eventually become Klein’s creative director); Zack Carr; John Calcagno; models galore (Iman and Christy Turlington among them); Nan Bush (who has been Bruce Weber’s partner for 30 years); and Klein himself. Even the accommodations were memorable: a hotel where the rooms were literally caves—“very cold caves, which is why people kept getting in bed together, to warm up,” says Weber with a laugh.

Of all the pictures that were taken it was the series of photos of Tom Hintnaus, a Brazilian-born Olympic pole-vaulter, that struck Klein as the images. Weber’s shots of Hintnaus arching his naked torso against a white wall in Calvin Klein underwear—his “package” competing for its own gold medal—were chosen for billboards and bus-shelter posters. I was on a crosstown bus in Manhattan early one morning right after they’d been put up. When we passed a shelter almost everyone on my side of the bus swiveled his or her head to get a better look at the image, which was basically shoving the man’s physicality down the audience’s throat. I was so curious about it that I got off the bus so I could see it properly. I must admit I was wary. Was this some newfangled version of what Leni Riefenstahl had done for Hitler with her so-called perfect Aryan images? In retrospect, Weber and Klein’s prescience about the cult of the body, which would start to sweep across our culture a few years later, was the real story.

Unfortunately, a big part of that story was aids. With the fashion world, as with the art world, one cannot recount this period without dividing it in two: before and after the virus. Once the crisis started, the list of the fallen grew long with lightning speed. Now there were voids where before there had been excitement and competition in the industry, carefree days replaced by fear of the next piece of bad news. The impact of aids on fashion itself can’t be measured in a literal way, but it clearly affected creativity as well as business. The fear of the disease and the reality of loss after loss, of course, impacted everyone who was touched by this modern plague. Sometimes it set up the old witch-hunting dynamic. There was a dramatic moment in Klein’s Playboy interview where he insisted that the tape recorder be turned off, because the writer asked him about the rumors going around that he had aids. (The interview eventually resumed.)

One could see the disease’s impact on the culture at large in the mid-80s advent of the gym lifestyle, replete with newly bulked-up physiques. Klein’s own physique went from slim to pumped. It was as if people’s bodies had become a kind of metaphor for the time. The collective subconscious: Let’s fight! And in the mid- to late 80s, Klein’s collections—like those of many other designers—accommodated the new silhouette, with bigger shoulders. Some, though not Klein, trafficked in a kind of Amazonian proportion. No wonder the supermodels were warrior-scale. They were yet another example of the decade’s bigger-is-better psyche—bigger offices, bigger houses, bigger paintings, bigger art galleries—which flourished before the flush 80s economy imploded.

The most momentous development in Klein’s personal life during this period, aside from his second marriage, was his decision to go into rehab. “There came a certain point when I knew that this was no longer fun,” he says, “and I couldn’t stop drinking or using recreational drugs. Then I had to do something about it.” He entered the Hazelden clinic in 1988. When I asked Klein if he was worried about the impact that undergoing treatment and the attendant publicity might have on the business, he said, “Betty Ford had changed all of that. She was the most courageous woman, and for her to do what she did at that time was really a breakthrough. That was a turning point. I was never concerned about Barry not understanding. I thought, If I don’t deal with this, we will really have serious problems with the business. I just won’t be able to work. So I had to do this. It wasn’t an option.”

“We were an established company,” Schwartz says. “There were people who could fill in until he got himself straightened out. It was strictly a case of protecting him, because there are a lot of nasty, vicious people out there.”

Klein had another advocate on his side, of course—Kelly. And it was during this period, as his personal life stabilized, that she had her greatest effect on Klein’s vision and marketing, tempering the label’s hothouse sensuality with a new classicism. Kelly’s main surrogate in the shows and in the ad campaigns was Christy Turlington, the most genteel of the era’s supermodels, who became the face of the Eternity fragrance when it launched, in 1988. The choice was most purposeful. “I always felt her intelligence came through in photographs,” Klein says. “At the time there was a lot of vulgarity and that didn’t interest me. It’s easy to go there. People respond to it. But I was looking for something more. And Christy is that person.” For her part Turlington understood the personal semiotics. “Calvin and Kelly were sort of this American royal couple,” she says. “I think that’s what I was fulfilling for them. I was stepping in as the Kelly character. The Eternity fragrance was about this ladylike setting. ‘Puritanical’ wouldn’t quite be the right word, but very serene. It was a new life for Calvin.” Their Camelot was their classic shingle-style “cottage” on Georgica Pond, in East Hampton.

The peace wouldn’t last. This is fashion, after all, and the pressure to evolve, to remain on the cutting edge, is a never-ending spur. That Klein managed to keep pushing his clothes forward, while also pushing the envelope with his advertising, fragrances, and other products, is testimony to his fierce focus. The pressure to grow the business was a parallel challenge, and Klein and Schwartz would face having to dig themselves out of a financial hole in 1992, when the 80s culture of financial excess came back to haunt the company. The partners had gotten themselves tied up in junk bonds, and when the jeans market plunged they were stuck with enormous interest payments on their debt. The troubles ballooned, and the company found itself facing a serious cash crunch. “I took my daughter for a walk on the beach in the Hamptons,” Klein remembers, “and said, ‘I really think we might have to sell everything.’ It was a terrifying moment.” Instead, the designer’s buddy David Geffen bought $62 million of the company’s outstanding debt at a sizable discount and told Klein and Schwartz to pay him back when they could. (They did, a year later.) As Klein says, “David helped us out with the financial part of it until we could straighten it out with the banks, which we were able to do in a short period of time. But the work was that I had to fix what was wrong with the company, with either the marketing divisions or management or design. I may have gotten complacent. We think things are good and all of a sudden you turn around and it falls apart. So that was a hard lesson. I didn’t think of selling at that moment. I thought, I’ve got to fix it and I will fix it. I knew I could do it, or I’d die trying.”

The 90s backlash against vulgarity and big everything suited him just fine, and soon another muse entered the picture: Kate Moss, whose English schoolgirl look (not the fancy boarding-school variety) was the absolute antithesis of the glamazon look that had been representing beauty in the fashion business in the 80s. Despite the storm that erupted over Kate Moss’s thin and “unshapely” physique, which some critics called borderline anorexic—complex issue, wrong target—she found a champion in Klein. He went one better than simply hiring her for a new Obsession campaign; he gave the photography gig to Mario Sorrenti, then a young unknown who was Moss’s boyfriend. The couple went off to a desert island, alone with a camera. The resulting campaign, with its intimate and emotional imagery, took the concept of personal in advertising to a new level. Making Moss the symbol of his company was a radical move even in a business known for skinny malinks, but, to put it squarely, she moved product. “With advertising, people respond very quickly, and you can measure it very easily,” says Klein. “We just saw the sales take off. They were sick of fake boobs.” As a counterbalance to Moss’s grace, Klein chose her opposite for the men’s side of things—Mark Wahlberg, then a cocky rapper beauty of a man-child.

All together the 90s played out for Klein as a breathtaking renaissance, including the invention, in 1993, of an entirely new business: CK, the lower-priced, youth-oriented line, inspired by Marci, who was about to take her first job out of college, at Saturday Night Live, and told her dad that his clothes were too expensive and not on-message enough for either herself or her generation. With the economy coming out of a recession, CK was such an instant hit that the late Amy Spindler, a normally acerbic critic for The New York Times, said “it looked like an incubator for everything exciting in street-level fashion.”

The company had very few creative bombs in the 90s, but one, a series of ads from 1995 shot by Steven Meisel for CK, blew up big-time. The TV spots, with an offscreen interlocutor putting questions to young models sitting against a wall of knotty pine paneling, were meant to be a humorous simulacrum of an open casting call, but the grungy rawness of the spots and their insinuating edge suggested to some viewers a porno shoot with under-age models. Not only was there a media firestorm, but the Clinton White House got involved. In a fund-raising speech Bill called the ads “outrageous,” and Hillary wrote that they “push[ed] the envelope of gratuitous sex and exploitation of children.” The Justice Department even launched an investigation to see if child-pornography laws had been violated. (Adweek has since listed the campaign as one of “the lowest moments in advertising.”) Klein pulled the ads—a first—after three weeks. He wasn’t about to stand on a freedom-of-speech soapbox. The company was opening its first store in New York, a John Pawson renovation of a Greek Revival building on Madison Avenue, and the last thing anyone wanted was a picket line.

The other big business drama of the 90s, after the cash crisis, was the company’s war with the manufacturer Warnaco and its C.E.O., Linda Wachner. Klein had met her in late 1993, when her reputation for “turnarounds”—she had revived Max Factor—was at its height. It wasn’t long before she cut a $62 million deal for Klein’s underwear business. (Most of the money went to pay back Geffen.) A roaring success at first—within a few years annual sales had jumped from $50 million to $300 million—the relationship soured after Warnaco also acquired the jeans license through a third party over Klein’s objections. Klein accused Wachner of making shoddy products and dumping them in price clubs and other low-end stores, sullying the label’s reputation. A lawsuit filed in 2000 by Calvin Klein, Inc., seeking to void the jeans license, was accompanied by public name-calling—Schwartz told The New York Times that Wachner was “a liar” and Klein decried her “abusive … disgusting” language. Much to the disappointment of fashion-industry bystanders, however, the suit was settled the morning it was scheduled to go to trial, with Warnaco retaining the jeans business and Klein gaining a strong say in distribution.

It was during the late 90s, with the economy going gangbusters and newly minted moguls cashing in left and right, that Klein and Schwartz, who had never gone the I.P.O. route, began to explore a possible sale of their company. Rumors were flying that Klein and Schwartz were asking for as much as $1 billion. But no buyer materialized. “The only reason we didn’t get it was because of our alliance with Warnaco and Linda Wachner,” says Schwartz. “There were a number of interested people, but they were all afraid of her.” A sale would have to wait until 2003.

The fragrance that Klein launched in 2000, Truth, would be his last as creative head of the company. He has always said that the names he picked for his fragrances were a reflection of what was going on in his life at the time. And a moment of truth was upon him. There had been upheavals in his personal life: in 1996 he and Kelly had separated (though they walked away from each other as close as ever), and at some point he began struggling anew with his substance-abuse issues. Soon the company would be in new hands, and with that change would come the question: What to make of Klein’s creative legacy?

The influence of the “unfashion” aspects of his repertoire—the jeans, the underwear, the fragrances, the advertising, the cross-branding into other areas such as products for the home, the marketing of it all—has been acknowledged ad infinitum. Things get trickier when it comes to the “fashion” side of his career; for the most part, insightful illumination of Klein’s place in fashion history has been elusive. In the early 90s there was criticism that his clothes were appropriating ideas from Giorgio Armani, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, and Jil Sander, and this gave momentum to the notion that Klein was a copier more than an inventor, that he was a skillful brander but not a real designer in the old-fashioned atelier sense. (Not that Klein had any interest in being old-fashioned.) If one were to pick at various collections, one could definitely find examples that fit the accusation, but this view really obscures the big picture.

Stored in Klein’s vast archives in the basement of the company’s Garment District headquarters are hundreds and hundreds of outfits from collections he presented over the 30-plus years he was running his label. When we were at the archives, Klein could tell I was overwhelmed by the thousands of outfits hanging on the racks; stored away like this, they just looked like old stuff. He knows how fashion has to come alive on a body if we are to understand what it’s about, so in true Calvin style he organized a mini-presentation, with every detail under his purview and flawlessly executed. He called up the very in-demand Natalia Vodianova, who had been his last featured model, hired the best hair and makeup artists, consulted with Melanie Ward (the editor at Harper’s Bazaar who worked closely beside him in the 90s), and showed me Calvin’s Calvin. What was striking about the selection was that it didn’t feel dusty; there was also a clear through-line in what he showed me, from the 70s and the 90s and up to his last collection, from 2003. (Intriguingly, he skipped the 80s.) Every single outfit—there were 40 altogether—shared a softness, a subtlety, and a sensuality. The palette was as American and as warm, rigorous, and nature-based as Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Among my favorite designs: a rose-print crêpe de Chine V-necked T-shirt and pajama pants from 1978; a sand-colored, bronze-studded wrap dress from 1979; a heather-gray cashmere crew-necked T-shirt and mineral-colored straight skirt from 1998; and a cream chiffon jersey-styled long gown from 2003 that looked as easy to wear as your favorite old T-shirt.

Klein’s Miami Beach house. The house, which Klein finished renovating in 2006, is where one really sees how his fashion voice carries over into his living spaces.

While I was working on this piece I attended a New York University communications class where Klein was sitting in as a guest teacher for a friend, Jean DeNiro. He told the students that “repetition is reputation.” It’s an idea that artists from Warhol to Donald Judd (whose stripped-down, what-you-see-is-what-you-get work Klein has said inspired him in the 90s) have demonstrated for decades. With Klein it goes deeper than an obvious truism about branding, and cuts to the essence of his voice as a designer. Think of the paintings of Agnes Martin, who basically returned to the same endeavor every day for 40 years, drawing or painting horizontal lines on canvas. The record of her hand—sometimes steady, sometimes wavering, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in subtle color—is about as moving as art gets. Think of the paintings of Robert Ryman, who for 55 years has also returned to the same strategy with almost every work: strokes of white paint on top of more strokes of white paint on an otherwise nude canvas. It’s the almost imperceptible evolutions and setbacks that tell all. Both of these artists, of course, are minimalists. And their paintings were on my mind when Klein put on his little show for me. (Marci Klein even uses the m-word about the man himself: “I think it describes how he fathers and what kind of a person he is; he doesn’t add shit on.”)

But, again, fashion doesn’t hang on a wall: the real action is the alchemy between clothes and wearer. Nan Bush sums it up: “I think his fashion sensibility was so subtle that a lot of people maybe didn’t get it. He had a definite point of view. The thing I always liked was that his designs let the person come through. When you saw them you didn’t necessarily say, Oh, look at that fashion. He let the person be the star.” Or as Jean DeNiro, who worked in sales at Bergdorf Goodman in the 90s, puts it: “His clients had complete confidence that not only were his clothes beautiful but that they could count on him. When [other designers] were sort of scaring them, or they couldn’t fit in the clothes, they were like, you know, ‘Give me Calvin. Help.’ ”

A shower with a bay-front view in the Miami Beach house.

As part of the sale to Phillips–Van Heusen, Klein remained a creative consultant to his old company, where his duties had him advising on the collections and campaigns through 2006 and launching one more fragrance, the tellingly named Euphoria. (The company is now in the creative hands of Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli, both of whom had worked under Klein and were essentially anointed by him as successors.) Now that he is largely his own man again, Klein has been enjoying his freedom like nobody’s business. The first thing he did was turn his new homes on Long Island and in New York and Miami Beach into projects that he could put his all into. The one in New York, a triplex on Perry Street in one of the fabled, troubled Richard Meier buildings, is a modernist masterpiece, with a gravity-defying stone staircase that looks like a waterfall. John Pawson’s description of the apartment as “a bit like a flying carpet or a glass house in the sky” is apt. (When Klein was deciding whether to buy the place, before the building had gone up, he hired a helicopter, taking a hop with Meier to check out the view from the proper altitude.) The house in Miami Beach, which Klein finished renovating in 2006, is where one really sees how his fashion voice carries over into his living spaces. It is both a monastic and fantastic place, with decorative details stripped down to nothing, so that what is there—the understated lighting, the plastered, almost Ryman-esque walls, the “simple” but extraordinary furniture—is exquisitely heightened. At night, a bamboo allée over the pool offers an unforgettable romantic peek across the bay at the lights of Miami Beach. It made me think about Klein as a young boy, dreaming of his life-to-be in Manhattan. And given his talent, his drive, and the fact that he has some serious cash in his pockets, I have a feeling there are some dreams still to be dreamt.